


A Sleeping Monster

by elle_stone



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Awkward Dreams, Best Friend Conversations, Bisexuality, Coming Out, F/M, Gen, M/M, Season/Series 01, canon-verse, the summary makes it sound like porn but it is not
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-07
Updated: 2016-06-07
Packaged: 2018-07-12 20:06:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,123
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7120558
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elle_stone/pseuds/elle_stone
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jasper’s used to waking up in the middle of the night, heart pounding from intense, frighteningly realistic dreams—it’s kind of habit for him by now—but not like this... Waking up from this sort of dream is different. Instead of scared and shaking with adrenaline, he’s…aroused. And frustrated and pretty much stuck. For the first time since they landed on Earth, he wishes he didn’t share a tent with his best friend.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Sleeping Monster

Jasper’s used to waking up in the middle of the night, heart pounding from intense, frighteningly realistic dreams—it’s kind of habit for him by now—but not like this. And it’s not like he _prefers_ the nightmares, because they’re definitely getting a little old by now. But at least when he wakes up thinking about Grounders and other imminent dangers he can stand up, walk around, go outside and assure himself that the camp is quiet and safe. Waking up from _this_ sort of dream is different. Instead of scared and shaking with adrenaline, he’s…aroused. And frustrated and pretty much stuck. For the first time since they landed on Earth, he wishes he _didn’t_ share a tent with his best friend.

He rolls over on his back and stares up at the tent ceiling, the vague shadows he can see moving there, and groans. It’s a very quiet groan, and he can’t help it. He passes one hand over his face and tries his absolute hardest to think of something— _anything_ —besides the images from his dream, but his attempts are all utterly futile. He’s beginning to wonder if maybe he _should_ just quietly get up and leave, but then where would he go—the woods? Yeah, that’s not happening. The only thing worse than getting killed by a Grounder is getting killed by a Grounder while you’re—

“Jasper, go back to sleep.”

The sound of a voice, even a familiar, grumpy, sleepy one, coming suddenly out of the darkness, jumpstarts his heart. He startles up, half-sitting and scanning the shadows for moving shapes, just on instinct. “Fuck, Monty,” he hisses, “don’t do that.” Then, calmer, but still leaning up on his elbows, he adds, a little nervously: “How long have you been awake?”

“This whole time. I can’t sleep.”

Monty’s occasional bouts of insomnia are nothing new, so Jasper’s not exactly surprised, but still. He was kind of hoping for a different answer. Sighing, he lets himself fall back down with a thump on the makeshift tent mattress and then lazily turns his head in Monty’s direction. He can’t see much. As he watches, a shape rises up and then settles again: Monty turning from one side to the other.

“So you heard—”

“Everything. And I can’t _begin_ to guess what you were dreaming about, what with all those _ah-ah-AH!—ooooh_ sounds.”

Jasper groans again—in embarrassment and annoyance this time—and hides his face with his hands. Not that it matters in this darkness. Monty’s impression of his erotic-dream sounds was not flattering, and actually he’s pretty sure his friend is quietly laughing at him right about now. So he reaches blindly over the side of the bed, picks up one of his boots, and throws it at the other side of the tent. He aims at Monty’s feet, not his head, because he’s not that mean, but when he hears a small crash and a high yelp, he’s satisfied nevertheless. Target met.

“It’s not funny,” he grumbles.

“Oh, no, it’s very serious,” Monty’s voice answers, but Jasper can just _hear_ in his tone how he’s smiling. He considers finding his other boot to throw but he only has two; he needs to save his resources.

“It is!” The words come out a little too loud; he rubs at his eyes and tries to pretend he’s anywhere else. Then, in a harsh whisper, he adds, “It is when I just want to go back to sleep and not think about it.”

“By ‘it,’ do you mean your dream or—”

“Both!” He sighs, frustrated, and tilts his head all the way back, arches up his back, unaware that if he were visible in the darkness, he’d look positively obscene. This slight attempt at releasing tension does absolutely nothing. “I don’t know why you find this so funny. The least you could do is try to help me think of…unsexy things.”

“Unsexy things,” Monty repeats, amusement still clear in his voice. “Okay. Mmmm…. The moon?”

Jasper rolls his eyes, hoping that Monty can guess what he’s doing even in the pitch black. “I don’t have a lot of thoughts about the moon.”

“Sports?”

“I have even fewer thoughts about sports. I don’t think you’re really trying.”

Monty doesn’t say anything to that, and Jasper’s just starting to wonder if maybe it will go away on its own, eventually, when another sudden burst of laughter erupts from the other side of the tent. The last time he heard Monty laugh like that, it was followed immediately by a stern teacher’s voice asking, “Mr. Green, is there something you’d like to share with the class?” and he repeats the words now, doing his best impression of their Bio teacher’s low, disapproving baritone. It’s not hard: he actually does feel pretty disapproving.

“Sorry!” Monty’s voice, more contrite than the voice he’d used in class, comes back to him. But he’s still laughing, so Jasper decides not to forgive him. “Sorry—I just—I know it’s not funny—”

“It’s certainly not _that_ funny,” Jasper grumbles.

“It’s just your reaction. You’re so _serious_ about it.”

“It’s annoying and I want to sleep. But I’ll be sure to laugh at you when the tables are turned.”

Something in his tone, perhaps, finally gets through, and Monty forces his laughter down. His voice is more somber when, after a moment, he sighs and says, “Okay. For real. Unsexy things. I promise I’ll think of something.”

“Thank you.”

Unfortunately, unsexy things are harder to come by than it would seem, and for a long while, they’re both silent. Jasper has no idea what Monty’s thinking, or not thinking—he wouldn’t even be surprised if it turned out his friend had fallen asleep on him—but his own brain stubbornly will not stop retuning to the one topic he’s forbidden it from dwelling on. Images from his dream keep flashing. First her. So _beautiful_ , just like in real life, and _soft_ like he imagines girls are soft, and—

“Jasper, can I ask you something?”

It would probably be rude to say _go float yourself, Monty_ , especially when the rational part of him is glad for the interruption, but still has to bite back the words. “Yeah. I guess.”

He can hear, in the silence, Monty’s slight hesitation. Then—“What were you dreaming about?”

Okay, not the question he was expecting. He sits up slowly, and leans into the darkness in Monty’s direction, as if he’d be able to make out anything other than uncertain shapes and shadows if he just put in a little bit of effort. “Monty, are you trying to take our friendship to a new and frighteningly more personal level?”

“Always.”

Jasper rolls his eyes and slowly lies back down. His silence should be answer enough, and for a few moments, at least, Monty doesn’t press. Jasper’s just about decided that the conversation’s over when:

“So was it about Octavia?"

“I’m _not_ going to talk about it. Nothing good can come from talking about it.”

A very slight pause follows, and Jasper’s hopes rise again, just for a second.

“Right, so it was about Octavia.”

If he knew where his other boot was, it would definitely be heading in Monty’s direction right about now—at his head this time.

Still, he sighs, and answers, eventually, “Yes.” It was about Octavia: they were in the woods, nothing like the real woods but peaceful and quiet, like he used to imagine the woods would be, on the ground a carpet of soft moss and around them the flickering flashes of lightning bugs. It’s unfair how vividly he can remember the curves of her body and the smoothness of her skin, the softness of her hair, how she was, at first, _everything_ , pressed against him, head tilted back as he trailed a line of kisses down her neck—

That was the good part.

No, that was the part that was good and not confusing. That was the _simple_ part.

“It was about Octavia,” he says again, hesitant and low. His words seem to disappear into the middle-of-the-night hour, no more than a low thrum, a vibration, and he half-wonders if Monty can even hear them. He keeps his whole body still, tense and still, and even though it takes him a long moment to say anything more, Monty doesn’t try to interrupt or hurry him along. Somehow he must sense the same confession that Jasper can feel, humming through him, words gathering up in his throat. “But it wasn’t,” he adds, stops again, lets out a breath. “It wasn’t just about Octavia.”

“Not _just_?” Monty’s voice gives away his expression, wide-eyed and bright-smiling, and just like that, there goes the quiet, confessional mood of a moment before. Nice for the short while it lasted. “Like an orgy?”

“Not an _orgy_!” Jasper rolls his eyes and then, without thinking, grabs his pillow from beneath his head and throws it over in Monty’s direction. Mistake: their sorry excuses for pillows aren’t much but without it he can feel the ground beneath his skull, hard and uneven with sticks and rocks. He grumbles, hides his face with his hands. “There were only three of us.”

This time the words are truly mumbled, almost incomprehensible.

“Three of you?” Monty repeats. He sounds gleeful, and _his_ voice is so loud he’s probably woken up the whole camp with it. “So who was the third?”

“I don’t want to tell you.”

Keeping his hands over his face makes him feel better, so he decides he’ll just live the rest of his life like this: a twig poking behind his ear, and his fingertips pressed against his eyeballs. When his pillows hits him in the face, he adjusts the plan slightly: he’ll keep it there too, as extra protection against visibility.

“Was it Clarke?”

“No.”

“Raven?”

“No.”

“Harper?”

“ _No_.”

“Fox?”

“Monty!”

“Wait—it was me?”

Jasper groans and throws the pillow off his face with a fitful shove. “Are you high?” he snaps. “You sound high.”

“You know if I found any herbs here you’d be the first one I’d tell,” Monty answers, obviously a little insulted that Jasper would even suggest otherwise. They did make a pact last year that neither of them would ever smoke without the other. Jasper’s beginning to think he should have insisted on a pact to never discuss sex dreams with each other, either. It’s too late to institute one now: he’ll need to get his revenge someday.

“Sooooo,” Monty asks, “it was about me?”

“No, it wasn’t about you, deflate your ego.” He puts his pillow beneath his head again, and rests his hands on his chest, pretending he’s divorced from his body, just an incorporeal spirit floating above the ground. That would solve a lot of his problems right now. “I just meant you’re not even close.”

The only response is an incredulous snorting sound.

Jasper knows a who-can-be-more-stubborn-contest when he sees one. Monty’s going to wait for him to just admit who it was, and he’s going to wait for Monty to change the subject. And since that’s never going to happen, because no one is more stubborn than Monty, and since he’s not going to fall asleep at this point either, he eventually sighs, and says, “Fine. You were closest when you guessed you.”

In the silence, he can _hear_ his best friend thinking. And thinking, and thinking—Jasper even glances over, as if he might be able to discern his expression, but all he sees is a dark Monty-shaped shadow.

“It was a _guy_ ,” he realizes finally, with the awed, satisfied tone of someone who’s just noticed an impressive but obvious truth.

“You are truly a genius,” Jasper answers, in a deadpan tone that’s meant to mimic his best friend. Monty doesn’t notice.

This would be the end of the discussion, if Jasper lived in a fair world, but he doesn’t. He knows that all too well by now. He’s not even surprised when, lightbulb all but flashing above his head, and his voice light with revelation, Monty announces: “It was _Bellamy_.”

Embarrassed, defeated, Jasper rolls onto his side, half-curls in, and mumbles, “Yes. It was Bellamy. And if you tell him or anyone else ever I will float you myself.”

He knew it was Bellamy even before he saw him, knew with that certain inexplicable clarity one often feels in dreams. First, he sensed someone behind him. Then two hands on his shoulders, two large, masculine hands; they’d slid down his arms slowly, followed by a lingering kissing to the back of his neck. Too hesitant to turn around himself, he let Octavia spin him, her hands on his shoulders and then running down his back, slightly teasing, tickling; he had the feeling that she was laughing, not to mock him but because she was happy, happy because of him and for him. And Bellamy—he’d been so _strong_. So certain. But patient, too: how slowly he’d leaned in, how carefully he’d pulled Jasper down into a kiss… The kiss itself he remembers now as only static, something his unconscious didn’t know how to sketch, a guesswork depiction of another man that close, one hand at the back of his neck, the other grabbing at his hip. All he’d wanted was more, more of it _all_ —

“I swear,” Monty is saying, now, serious for once, “I swear on the Earth itself I will never tell anyone ever.”                                                                                                                                                                       

“Good. You better not.” He’d never live it down. And if it got around to Octavia or, worse, Bellamy, he’d probably have to leave the camp entirely and live off nuts and berries all alone in the woods. He does his best to push that terrifying thought aside, and starts to shift around on the bed, looking for some semi-comfortable position in which to wait for dawn. His problem is still a problem, which is annoying, but the persistence of the dream memories probably accounts for that. Or he has a serious medical condition like Permanent Erotic-Dream-Induced Boner and won’t that be fun to explain to Clarke?

“Hey Jasper?”

“I’m not giving you any details, Monty, take your head out of the gutter. I know that’s—”

“Hard?”

“Shut up. A challenge for you. But I’m done sharing.”

“I wasn’t going to ask about the dream.” He pauses, and Jasper senses a slight embarrassment about him, which is semi-satisfying at least. “Not directly. I was just going to ask—does this mean you like guys?”

Jasper knows the answer to this, in his gut, without having to think about it at all. But still he doesn’t answer right away. The truth is that he’s found guys attractive before. His Chemistry teacher. Several James Bonds. Miller, which made the two months they shared a cell in the Skybox pretty awkward, though he think he hid it well. Finn, in an overwhelmed-by-his-coolness way. But he’s never really thought about it. He’s never put any of these feelings into words, or wondered if other boys felt these things, or compared his feelings for boys to the way he feels about girls. And he’s never felt toward anyone what he feels toward Bellamy: an intense combination of desires, a desire to _be_ him but also just to _be near_ him but also to kiss him, and to _other things_ him—Jasper’s not even sure he knows how to pin all of this down into discrete, explainable concepts. It’s just a mess of want inside him that he tries to leave alone; a sleeping monster, perhaps, that he doesn’t want to wake up.

But he knows there’s only one thing he can say now. Just: “Yeah.” His voice sounds several times more confident than he feels, but as soon as the word is out of his mouth, an unexpected calm spreads through him. “I do. Is that—going to be weird—?”

“No. Of course not.” Monty’s tone makes it quite clear that he finds even the idea of weirdness between them absurd. Which it is, really. “I do think it’s a little strange though.”

“You think liking both guys and girls is strange?” That hurts a little, and surprises him, because he’s always thought Monty was pretty open and—

“No, not that.” A hand-shaped shadow waves briefly about in the air, sweeping the thought away. “That you dreamed about Bellamy and Octavia together. They’re _siblings_. Isn’t that…incest?”

“No, because I was in the middle and—shut up, I am not telling you the details!”

Monty’s laughter, which began as something subtle and quiet around the time Jasper started answering, quickly grows, and Jasper hides his face under the pillow again until the sound of it finally dies down and dissipates. Then he peeks out again. “I’m ready to change the subject, how about you?”

“Okay, okay.” One last quiet _ha_ , and a deep sigh follow. “Okay, unsexy things, right?” Monty, obviously more serious now, perhaps finally intending to be helpful, makes a thoughtful, humming noise. Jasper sighs. He’s not about to get his hopes up, and is pleasantly surprised when his friend says, a few moments later, “Do you remember the first time we made moonshine?”

“Yeah.” He grins, because it’s one of those memories that shouldn’t be good, but it _is_. “It was disgusting. I can’t believe we drank all of it.”

“How were we supposed to know it wasn’t supposed to taste like that?”

“Right, not like we had the refined tastes that we have now.”

They’re both grinning by now, the memories of their past selves, like past lives, coming back to them, but with nothing of the bitter with the sweet, for once. One memory slides into the next: the first time they got high, the first party they snuck into, the dares they used to give each other, the wasted afternoons, wondering what real afternoons felt like, real Earth afternoons.

Eventually, the silences between stories grow longer, Jasper’s eyelids grow heavier—he realizes his body has calmed, without him even noticing—the light in the tent is starting to become gray with almost-sunrise, and he can make out Monty’s face again, his drowsy smile, the way his own eyes have started to close.

“You have the morning guard shift today?” Monty asks.

Jasper shakes his head. “Nope. Afternoon.”

“Think you’ll sleep until then?”

“Yeah. Probably.”

“Me too.”

Monty yawns again, and it catches; Jasper’s jaw pops as he opens his mouth wide. Then he pulls his blanket up to his ears and lets his eyes close properly, sure sleep will carry him away before too long. “Good morning, Monty,” he mumbles, and hears, right before he drifts away, a quiet, “Good morning, Jasper” mumbled back at him.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by [this post](http://kinetic-elaboration.tumblr.com/post/143296967800/so-lets-be-criminals-montyjordan).


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